Profile: Director & Writer Julie Taymor

Last week I saw Julie Taymor’s film Titus (1999), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. I had no idea what it was about, but a blue-painted & affectless Anthony Hopkins mug on the cover seemed to draw me in. I guess I was in the mood for something serious?

Well, if you know anything about that Shakespeare guy, you know that he’s got two kinds of properties: comedy and tragedy. This is one of the tragedies, it was easy to figure out pretty quick. And the only thing I knew about Julie Taymor was her name, and I was trying to figure out if I was merely confusing it with “Jeffrey Tambor.”

Anyway, I stepped into the film with no idea of anything about it. It’s been on my mind since seeing it, and I just looked up Taymor’s birth data (12/15/52, Boston, MA, 10:06 AM) to try to put a vocabulary to my reaction to the film, which has to do with the particular flavor of vision that informs the production design, timing and the framing of many of the visuals - the shots.

The first things I note are the aspects to the nodal axis:

-true Black Moon Lilith (BML) on the Leo/7th South Node

-the asteroid Lucifer (1930) in Scorpio/9th square the axis

-retrograde Jupiter in Taurus in the 3rd house square the axis and opposing Lucifer

-Venus in Aquarius/12th and Mars in Aquarius/1st, both conjunct the North Node

-Descendant conjunct the South Node

This is just one conversation, in more or less fixed grand-square fashion, yet it needs to be broken down. What she knows a lot about is Leo BML in the 7th, as anything on the South Node indicates something we come into this life understanding much about. BML here points to an understanding of the power of one’s primal creativity, and the effect such expressions can have on other people. And conjunct the Descendant, ways of exploring how to achieve balance and harmony are well-understood.

The unresolved issues (squares to the nodes) are Lucifer in Scorpio/9th and rx Jupiter in Taurus/3rd, indicating a conversation between the urge to get to the bottom lines of, via & with ideas (Scorpio/9th) and the desire to slow down the mind in order to get clearer about what it is that’s worth expressing (rx Jupiter in Taurus/3rd).

And then this business on the North Node - Venus in the 12th, Mars in the 1st and the Ascendant, all in Aquarius. Perhaps her karmic past includes a getting caught up in the collaborative expression (SN Leo/7th) that left out her unique creative vision (Venus in Aquarius/12th on NN), leaving her feeling she didn’t get to assert herself creatively as a true expression of her independence (Aquarius Ascendant & Mars in Aqua/1st on NN).

The 3rd-9th axis has something to say about how information gets in and out (and what kind of information it is), and Taurus-Scorpio as an axis has much to do with power: Taurus is about learning to run under the steam of self, while Scorpio is about pooling steams and running with others.

She certainly seems to have learned to integrate that stuff on the North Node - nothing she does looks even remotely like what others are doing, and it’s the last thing you’d expect. She seems also to have found a balance between that Leo SN and the Aquarius NN in doing that unique thing that makes her work stand out and be immediately recognizable, yet not having left behind her skills and strengths of working collaboratively with others.

Tom is available for soul-centered astrology consultations. See http://tdjacobs.com for more information and to sign up for his mailing list.

January 25, 2008 By Tom Jacobs

Profile: Playwright Edward Albee

Playwright and philosopher Albert Camus held that every artist, no matter the medium, spends his or her entire life working out one idea or problem, has one thing to say. He wrote that even no matter how many media were used creatively, the same problem was the focus of the artist’s life and work.

Understanding this, I’ve gone through phases of working with and in response to (being inspired by) the work of various artists. We all do this, but we don’t always understand why. We’re living myths in our lives, and there are others who provide examples for us along our way. We can lose interest when the artist seems to diverge from our path, or when our path changes and that of the artist seems not to.

I had this experience with the work of the playwright Edward Albee, ending a few years ago. I’d read or seen most of his work, and what he was trying to do became clear to me. And after that, I was bored with him and moved on. Thanks, Ed, I seemed to say, but I’ve gotten all I can get from you. Thanks for your time, and best wishes on whatever you laid out for yourself this time around.

And then, yesterday, something happened.

I heard an NPR interview with and about him, about the first act he’d written and appended to his famous one-act, Zoo Story. It’s a story about a fairly well-to-do, rather uptight, unimaginative man who has a chance encounter with a very different sort of man in a park. The new version (Peter and Jerry) includes an act previous to this act that tells the story of the rather uptight man, putting him at home with his wife. (I haven’t yet read it, but this is from the description in the radio story.)

Albee said something about the play had always stayed with him and made him want to do something else with/to it. When I heard about the new act and therefore context, I got back on the Albee train - he’d enlarged his previous vision, the one I saw and read too much of and became bored by. This play is the one that launched his career, and many in the theater world hold it as sacred and were confounded by his audacity to change the play they loved so. He commented in the interview that he’s after all the one who wrote it.

I couldn’t locate a birth time for Albee (12 March 1928, Washington, DC), but he’s got a Uranus-Jupiter in Aries that I just really want to put in the 3rd house. That would be an early-morning birth, and Chiron in Taurus would be in the 4th, one kind of signature for adoption. Now, it’s just speculation, but I rreeaalllllyy want that Uranus-Jupiter to be in the 3rd, because of his lifelong unapologetic styles of writing and speaking, and the nature of the stories he’s inspired to tell.

Without the time of birth, we can see the South Node in Sagittarius, with Saturn pretty tightly on it. This paints a picture of an orientation to beliefs and ideas that’s built intentionally and with much hard work. The Sun in Pisces squares the nodes, indicating that something very large in the karmic past, something that was orbited, was not approached and understood in ways that seemed to get him where he was going, and he now has the challenge of learning the right size and use of ways of defining the sense of self.

The South Node ruler Jupiter is conjunct Uranus in Aries, and squared by Pluto in Cancer. The role he expects to have (South Node ruler) is that of Jupiter in Aries conjunct Uranus in Aries - someone with something big, original and probably cutting to say. The square to Pluto in Cancer screams that he is not aligned with tradition and the powers that wish to uphold it, but is doing something original that probably challenges everything traditional.

And then there’s the pileup in Aquarius - Eros, Pallas, Mars, Arjunsuri, Ceres, Venus, Mercury, and Vesta. This underscores his expectation of the role of being Uranian, given the conjunction of the South Node ruler with Uranus. His sense of proportion and how he understands harmony and balance (Venus) is working together with how he perceives things and his communication style (Mercury), in the sign of things that are different. And the drive to action being there indicates that not only is what he wants to think about and express creatively (Ve-Me) in the sign of things working differently than normal, but how he’s moved to get things done (Mars) also works differently - how he goes about getting out there his ideas and creativity we can also expect to be different.

His North Node is in Gemini, which indicates a call to stretch into the new territory of flexibility, and curiosity, of openness to new information. Reworking the piece that launched his career is a very Gemini thing, most certainly not a South Node in Sagittarius conjunct Saturn thing. His willingness to stretch into what is new territory for him (the North Node for any us is new territory) surprises me more than his willingness to “ruffle feathers,” as he’s always been very good at that (check his biography for stories of him as the editor of the school paper). But refiguring a major work of his intentional design (Saturn in Sagittarius)?

The best part for me is that Albee’s almost 80 years old. I’ve always knows it’s never too late for 0ld playwrights to learn new tricks, but to see it happening with this one is an inspiration to me.

January 20, 2008 By Tom Jacobs